Satoshi Nakamoto was one person behind Bitcoin, similarly.
The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
51–60 of 464 posts
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#52This seems super complex to me. I am a single dev that runs a $30k\mo software based company off of PHP+MariaDB+bootstrap+jQuery+few other plugins. Hosted on a managed HIPPA setup. The firewall+app+DB servers run me about $550\month and I have excellent support. I spend effectively 100% of my time on business logic\ui and zero time keeping up to date on infrastructure (and learning it). Which means my customers benefit from me fixing problems and adding features. Kudos to what works for you....super great... And, for me at least...it is even more "boring" and awesome.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#53That's awesome and it is a tech stack that I try to mirror and am confident running myself as well! It's incredible the amount of knowledge required for a single person tho when you think about it eh? It's the full frontend (which I would have more trouble with) + databases + caches + search engine + metrics + deployment + source control + sysadmin all baked in a single person who is also trying to make it a business…
as someone who has only worked on small teams, i thought this was normal. My current position is leading a small team, but we have interactions with a number of teams inside of FANG companies and it's amazing the limited amount of knowledge and access each position/person has. Most of my engineers can run circles around our partners. I always thought every engineer should know how to deploy a server, install deps, un…
Yeah, I worked in start ups and that's where I got the fast pace and I think that allowed me to rise to high ranks very fast at bigger companies as I have a solid understanding of all the stack.
In bigger companies traditionally they had a person / department more specialized per part of the stack, I think is a lot about the "devops" culture.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#54Only question I can think of that I didn’t see an answer for is: is he running one postgres db, which is shared between the web and api services? Multiple services with only one db gets hairy fast with questions like: who owns the migrations? does the migration owning service have to restart the other service so the other service gets the new db column/table? etc
Unless the web also uses the API service to get its data. Really great article
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#55As a software SaaS CISO, who also pentests and determines partner risk - I take the approach of not sharing such in depth details. Articles like this are fantastic fingerprinting recon for those that look to compromise sites.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#56Just because I saw you (wenbin) in this thread I thought I'd be helpful:
On https://www.listennotes.com/api/pricing/
There's a typo: "Instantly access to 771,769 podcasts"
Instantly -> Instant
Really enjoyed the post, thanks for sharing.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#57As someone still in school, this type of article -- though inspiring-- kind of scares me, to be honest. I don't think I could do any one of the things mentioned in this article.
Hello poidos, (I'm the author of this blog post) I couldn't do all these things when I was in school :) I worked in companies for a few years and learned some engineering practices. Then I had basic skills to prototype my own side projects. Then after working on many silly side projects, I started Listen Notes. And initially, Listen Notes was running on 3 tiny DigitalOcean servers ($5/month each?). I logged in each s…
Thanks for the info. It's an interesting set of tools today, but it's helpful to hear that it has evolved to that point in terms of automation and infrastructure.
The first version of a web service can be as simple as flask app which you run in a screen session somewhere. Better to start somewhere than get overwhelmed and never do the thing at all.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#58Thats a ton of servers!
What is your monthly AWS spend?
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#59key missing info though: does it make money? I checked the site and it looks like a mix of ads (that are blocked of course) and a patreon with 5 supporters.
Actually it's not the missing info... because it's none of your business. It's a technical post about his solo founder and operator DevOps practice.
I respectfully disagree. HN is very much about the -business- of tech. Telling us how you made your mousetrap is all well and good... Having us ask how many mice it has captured is absolutely relevant. Germane even.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#60That's awesome and it is a tech stack that I try to mirror and am confident running myself as well! It's incredible the amount of knowledge required for a single person tho when you think about it eh? It's the full frontend (which I would have more trouble with) + databases + caches + search engine + metrics + deployment + source control + sysadmin all baked in a single person who is also trying to make it a business…
as someone who has only worked on small teams, i thought this was normal. My current position is leading a small team, but we have interactions with a number of teams inside of FANG companies and it's amazing the limited amount of knowledge and access each position/person has. Most of my engineers can run circles around our partners. I always thought every engineer should know how to deploy a server, install deps, un…
And the thing is, generalists do better work. They do less work overall because there are fewer of them, but compare a typical enterprise 50 person team to the output of a team of 5 generalists, hands down the generalists will make a better product every time because there's no buck passing or shoulder shrugging about problems.